Jazz Quotes

Excerpted from Basic Musicianship

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Charles Earland - "Sometimes you need to change your taste." [P]
Kiki Ebsen - "Never turn your back on enthusiasm." [P]
Billy Eckstine - "I'm not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don't last."
Billy Eckstine - "I'm glad I don't have perfect pitch because it can drive you crazy." [P]
Billy Eckstine - "You can't sing about love unless you know about it." [P]
Billy Eckstine - "If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music."
Harry "Sweets" Edison - "I should have paid him [Basie] to be in the band because I was having so much fun. You couldn't pay for that kind of education." [P]
Roy Eldridge - "I didn't know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out... changes." [P]
Mark Elf - "I try to make every tune on every record like it's the only tune on the record." [P]
Eliane Elias - "I like the interplay in the music." [P]
George Eliot - "I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music."

T S Eliot - "Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity." [P]
T S Eliot - "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find how far one can go." [P]
Kurt Elling - "Jazz singing is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it."
Kurt Elling - "The audience should feel they are hearing the future, arriving just on time." [P]

Duke Ellington - "It's all music."
Duke Ellington - "There is no art without intention." [P]
Duke Ellington - "A goal is a dream with a finish line." [P]
Duke Ellington - "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." [P]
Duke Ellington - "Music is what I hear & something that I live by."
Duke Ellington - "A problem is a chance for you to do your best."
Duke Ellington - "Life has only two rules: 1. Never quite 2. Always remember 1." [P]
Duke Ellington - "Music is my mistress & she plays second fiddle to no one."
Duke Ellington - "There are two kinds of music. Good music & the other kind."
Duke Ellington - "I merely took the energy it takes to pout & wrote some blues." [P]
Duke Ellington - "What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?"
Duke Ellington - "The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen." [P]
Duke Ellington - "To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money." [P]
Duke Ellington - "Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did."
Duke Ellington - "By & large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."
Duke Ellington - "I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right." [P]

Don Ellis - "I expect the audience to come up to my level." [P]
Don Ellis - "I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass."
Don Ellis - "To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel." [P]
Don Ellis - "I worked until I could play & do changes at any tempo in any key & said 'What else is there?' Now I'm finding out."
Herb Ellis - "It was in tune when I bought it." [P]
John Erskine - "Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic." [P]
Peter Erskine - "Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary." [P]
M.C. Escher - "I don't use drugs... my dreams are frightening enough." [P]
Ellery Eskelin - "You can play right notes that sound wrong and you can play wrong notes that sound right, but it is in the end very important to mean what you play." [P]
Kevin Eubanks - "Let your life be your music & let your music be your life." [P]

Bill Evans - "Jazz is not a what, it is a how." [P]
Bill Evans - "To imitate someone is to insult them." [P]
Bill Evans - "Everyone is working who should be." [P]
Bill Evans - "If you take the time & your talent is real, it will last." [P]
Bill Evans - "You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody." [P]
Bill Evans - "Jazz music has always been a place where anything is possible." [P]
Bill Evans - "You never master the instrument. You always just strive to get better." [P]
Bill Evans - "When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style." [P]
Bill Evans - "Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality." [P]
Bill Evans - "Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created." [P]
Bill Evans - "Develop a comprehensive technique and then forget that and just be expressive."
Bill Evans - "Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument." [P]
Bill Evans - "It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not, it's feeling."
Bill Evans - "I like people who have worked long & hard, developing through introspection & dedication." [P]
Bill Evans - "You can't explain Jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it's feeling, not words."
Bill Evans - "I'm using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable."
Bill Evans - "Despite the fact I'm a professional performer, it's true that I have always preferred playing without an audience."

Bill Evans - "Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise."
Bill Evans - "Words are the children of reason & therefore can't translate the feeling of Jazz because they're not part of it."
Gil Evans - "The arranger doesn't get any royalties, but I had so much fun doing it." [P]
Gil Evans - "That's all I did. That's all I ever did was try to do what Billy Strayhorn did." [P]
Jon Faddis - "I have to bread out of the shell and develop my own identity. What I'm trying to do is take phrases all these cats have assimilated and let it come out as Jon Faddis."
Art Farmer - "The music is what sustains the player from beginning to end. That's where you get your life from. That's why you play Jazz." [P]
Malachi Favors - "As a musician, it is just a learning process all the way." [P]
Pierre Favre - "Without risk, there isn't any living communication." [P]
Leonard Feather - "Genius is a word too often tossed around in music circles." [P]
Lorraine Feather - "But I was only hearing things." [P]
Maynard Ferguson - "The day of the great Jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over." [P]
Maynard Ferguson - "Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about Jazz music." [P]
Amina Figarova - "Everything is an inspiration, everything has sound, color and rhythm." [P]

Barry Finnerty - "The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence."
Clare Fischer - "You never get a chance to play what you really are, and if you do, you notice that you can't because you haven't been." [P]
Ella Fitzgerald - "It isn't where you came from, it's where you're going that counts." [P]
Ella Fitzgerald - "Forgive me if I don't have the words. Maybe I can sing it & you'll understand."
Ella Fitzgerald - "When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph."
Ella Fitzgerald - "The fabulous places I've been, wonderful things that've happened, great people I've met ought to make a story." [P]
Ella Fitzgerald - "Don't give up trying to do what you really want. Where there is love & inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong." [P]
F. Scott Fitzgerald - "The Jazz Age became less & less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders." [P]
Tommy Flanagan - "I like to surprise myself." [P]
Bela Fleck - "It doesn't have to be happy music to be inspiring." [P]
Pete Fountain - "If you're making money people don't think you're playing Jazz. When you're not making money they think you're a great Jazz musician." [P]
Mimi Fox - "There is only one reason to do music. Music is a deep language to share with people." [P]
Michael Franks - "I write autobiographically, although I apply liberal amounts of poetic license." [P]

Nnenna Freelon - "No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit." [P]
Von Freeman - "Don't tune up too much baby. You'll lose your soul." [P]
David Friesen - "Focus on the notes and the phrasing because that's where the substance is." [P]
Robert Fripp - "What we hear is the quality of our listening." [P]
Robert Fripp - "If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on?" [P]
Bill Frisell - "There's so much music out there & so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument."
Bill Frisell - "There's always this sound out there that's just a little beyond my reach & that just sort of keeps me going." [P]
Dave Frishberg - "I don't blow but I'm a fan. Look at me swing, ring a ding ding. I even call my girlfriend 'Man' I'm so hip." [P]
Kenny G - "I don't mind being the butt of a joke if it's a funny joke." [P]
Barry Galbraith - "Practice 15 or 20 years and then it comes out spontaneously." [P]
Roberta Gambarini - "There's always room for improvisation or changes of expression."
Roberta Gambarini - "We change every minute, never the same. If there's no room to express the changes there can't be any truthfulness." [P]
Melody Gardot -"Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music." [P]
Judy Garland - "Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else." [P]
Erroll Garner - "Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new." [P]
Kenny Garrett - "Rather than say I play Jazz, I simply say I play music." [P]

Rudy Van Gelder - "When I achieved what I thought the musicians were trying to do, the sound sort of bloomed. When it's right, everything is beautiful." [P]
George Gershwin - "Life is a lot like Jazz... it's best when you improvise." [P]
George Gershwin - "When you want 'em you can't get 'em, when you've got 'em, you don't want 'em." [P]
George Gershwin - "Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend."
George Gershwin - "True music must repeat the thought & inspirations of the people & the time. My people are Americans & my time is today."
Ira Gershwin - "Love is sweeping the country."
Ira Gershwin - "One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them." [P]
Ira Gershwin - "Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state."

More Jazz quotes & quotations:

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